‘Friends’ Has New BFFs: New York Teenagers

Above, a scene from a 1995 episode of “Friends.” If you are 13 to 20 and live in New York, you may find yourself very much in the “Friends” zone.Credit
Alice S. Hall/NBC, via Getty Images

Twenty-one years ago last month, “Friends” made its debut on NBC, to almost instant acclaim and popularity, beginning a 10-year run that ushered into the culture various styles and mannerisms — Jennifer Aniston’s haircut, most notably — in a way that now rarely occurs, because the television landscape has become drastically more diffuse.

On “Friends,” characters emphasized their adjectives (with “very” and “really” and “so”) to such an extent that the habit prompted a study by linguists at the University of Toronto. In 2005, they published a paper asserting that the word “so” was the intensifier used 45 percent of the time on the show. In British English, researchers had found, it was used only a quarter as often. “So” was on the rise in the American vernacular, and the series was, theoretically, the cause.

If you are 32 or 50, there is a good chance that you are not currently occupying the world of “Friends,” which outlines a ’90s Manhattan circumscribed by a coffeehouse and a West Village apartment that, true to the period, conjures a Pottery Barn designer’s vacation in the lower-tier flea markets of Tuscany. If you are somewhere between 13 and 20, however, and particularly if you live in New York, you may find yourself very much in the “Friends” zone. This is not because you landed on an episode, after coming home semi-wasted, on late-night television, where it is almost always on in syndication, but because you watch it methodically, on Netflix, in sequence, through its more than 230 shows.

On Facebook, more than 19 million people like “Friends,” nearly four times as many as like “Seinfeld.” (So forgotten is “Mad About You,” another Manhattan-based totem of ’90s situation comedy, that when you enter the name into Facebook’s search function, you get “Mad Men.”) The currency that “Friends” has generated among young people was even the subject of a joke during the second and otherwise entirely humorless season of “True Detective.” Last spring, the “Friends” theme song was performed at a choral concert at the Bronx High School of Science; students at Brearley and Saint Ann’s are enthralled. All of this despite the fact that “Friends” is a laugh-tracked network enterprise predating the era of social media.

As a portrayal of post-collegiate life in New York, “Friends” offers neither the Cristal and Bergdorf’s rendering of “Sex and the City” nor the jolie-laide bohemianism of “Girls,” let alone the stoner chaos of “Broad City,” which makes its resurgent appeal additionally curious. Shot on a set in Los Angeles, “Friends” gives us a vision of New York that is ostentatiously fake but rarely makes use of fantasy.

Having debuted during the first few months of the Giuliani administration, the show keeps things dingy and menacing way past the point at which the city itself had exfoliated its grimier layers. The seemingly genial neighborhood tailor is likely to grope his male clients before altering their trousers. The guy you can see outside your apartment window is naked and creepy. Phoebe and Ross are mugged in a back alley seemingly borrowed from the set of “Rent” near their coffee bar, Central Perk, well into the first Bloomberg term. At another point, Phoebe and Rachel decide they need to learn self-defense to ward off predators.

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What’s novel about “Friends,” or what must seem so to a certain subset of New York teenagers of whom so much is expected, is the absence among the six central characters of any quality of corrosive ambition. The show refuses to take professional life or creative aspirations too seriously. What does Chandler Bing actually do? I was never entirely sure. In the series’ ninth season he is an advertising intern. On “Girls” you have writers who are trying to be Mary Karr; on “Friends” you have actors who want to be on “Days of Our Lives.”

The dreamscape dimension of “Friends” lies in the way schedules are freed up for fun and shenanigans and talking and rehashing, always. “In the back of our minds we know it’s unrealistic,” Maggie Parham, a 15-year-old who lives on the Upper West Side, told me. The characters “have nice apartments and lots of free time but there is something about that perfect lifestyle that is fun to watch,” she said, adding, “They all work, but they seem to be able to get out of work easily.”

Another high school girl I spoke to, a 17-year-old who lives in Brooklyn, told me she had watched every episode of “Friends” and half of them twice. “That’s true for a lot of my friends,” she said. “We are really into categorizing each other as a Rachel or a Monica; it’s fun to play into that.” This girl asked that I not use her name because she was in the process of applying to colleges, and in the world as it is, a public statement about an entertainment produced not in the 18th century — a statement a college-admissions officer might find on the Internet and regard as frivolous — is considered perilous. “I think, for people my age, it’s such a stressful time in terms of school and college applications, and ‘Friends’ is a funny show that you can watch before bed and just chill out,” she said.

It did not escape her attention that the characters are almost never stressed out about their jobs. “All they do is hang out in a coffee shop or a really nice apartment,” she said. “It’s the ideal situation.”